(Newser)
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Before Doctor Zhivago became an acclaimed film in 1965, it was a novel—one the CIA secretly printed. The Washington Post delves into the book's fascinating back story by way of 130 freshly declassified CIA documents (released at the request of the authors of The Zhivago Affair, out June 17) that trace the book's unusual course. The Soviet Union banned Boris Pasternak's novel from publication; it was first published in Italy, in Italian, in November 1957. Two months later, the CIA was sent photos of the book's pages by British intelligence, who prodded the US to get it into Soviet hands.

Ensuing CIA memos pointed out the book's "great propaganda value," both as a way to alert Russians to the fact that their own government was keeping a book by the man considered "the greatest living Russian writer" from them, and through its "humanistic message, [which] poses a fundamental challenge to the Soviet ethic of sacrifice of the individual to the Communist system." And so the CIA, careful to cloak its involvement, made it available in Russian, first printing a hardcover version in the Netherlands; the first print run was loaded into an American station wagon in September 1958 and parceled out to CIA stations and assets throughout Western Europe, including the Vatican pavilion at the World's Fair in Brussels. A pocket-sized book was printed the following year, at CIA headquarters, under the guise of a fictitious Parisian publisher. The Post's full story explains how a contractual misstep with the first printing raised suspicions that the CIA may have been involved.

No surprise...the whole purpose of the CIA is to meddle in the affairs of other countries. They assassinate, stir up wars, bribe world leaders and do everything but represent the American people.

julianpenrod

Apr 7, 2014 2:42 PM CDT

Among other things, 57 years this fact was withheld, how many people even thought it was true? Don't sat conspiracies don't last long times! And, face it, this is being revealed now only to quell questions into other, even deeper, longer, more widespread conspiracies. Invoke any of these and the quislings will retort, “Well, what about the 'Doctor Zhivago' conspiracy? That fell apart!” No, it was allowed to “fall apart” by the New World Order to convince the gullible there are no more secrets. Incidentally, has anybody asked why the Chris Christie bridge scandal conspiracy fell apart so totally, from outlandishly revealing emails to a report “exonerating” Christie, but commissioned by Christie himself? There is very little reason, if any, to assume any group that managed to get into power would pull anything so ham handed! The New World Order quislings will bleat, “That's what you say! Everybody makes mistakes, they just made big ones!” And that will be intended to make you think the Christie scandal wasn't wholly engineered to convince the malleable that all conspiracies necessarily fall apart, meaning, there are no others in existence! But “Doctor Zhivago” was always obvious as a case of poison pen character assassination doggerel. “There were people in those days who ate human flesh”, supposedly describing the want in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Representing Socialist leaning soldiers as necessarily unwilling to face the Germans advancing at their borders. The ludicrous “love affair” between Zhivago and Lara, underplayed to the point of being all but nonexistent, a tediously obvious attempt to hide the fact that this was just a work of political backstabbing. But, note, too, the degree to which what is represented as cultural interference can itself be at least accepted by such as the CIA as a tool of mind control and societal manipulation. Quisling shills for the New World Order keep saying that nothing less powerful than a bomb can change people's thinking and behavior. They acknowledge a degree of propaganda and bolstering material, but say that that is no more than secondary to the primary purpose of CIA/Mossad/MI-5, which is blowing up buildings and blaming local dissidents who won't cooperate with the New World Order, getting the population to kill each other, to destabilize to the point where the NWO can march in and take over. The revelation of a CIA attempt to use a social media network to try to incite dissident breakdown on the society in Cuba argues differently. It didn't even send propaganda, just gave young people the chance to gripe, evidently in the expectation,m not just the hope, that that griping would turn into a society destroying vehicle! All based on an apparent tenet of the nation destroyers, that “The majority of the immature are stupid enough to outdo any group of older, mature imbeciles.” Any power monger group will always invoke the phrase, “You got to get them while they're young!” It seems that many if not most young are so witless that they don't see beyond their noses, don't see 90% or more of the repercussions of their actions, don't realize 90% of the world around them to know when they are being lied to, and are so often so hateful of their parents they can be formed into a sociopathic mob of murderers! They certainly don't seem to be able to grasp the fact that they can become their parents one day, that their parents thought like them when young but learned about the world as they aged, and, when the young start to agree with their parents, they will be saddled with the dictatorship that their stupidity allowed to flourish! And it should be mentioned the programs to destabilize Poland with the help of Pope John Paul II, the first non Italian pope in centuries, who so conveniently arrived at the same time as the Solidarity movement started and who used this connection to facilitate subversive movements there. After the equally convenient “death” of Pope John Paul I! How many know about Operation Capuccino, whereby papal representative Pio Laghi would coordinate with Reagan White House hoods William Clark and William Casey to facilitate the transport of “photocopiers and printing equipment” along with money to maintain the operation, into Warsaw, using John Paul II as cover? Even if that's all they smuggled in, it still represents a violation of sovereign state rights for the purpose of societal destruction. John Paul II was a CIA spook. It also looks, now, that the Chinese who brought down Tiananmen weren't necessarily “haters of liberty and beauty”, but individuals who recognized a CIA/Mossad/MI-5 plot when they saw it!

DanJay

Apr 7, 2014 2:12 PM CDT

I read Doctor Zhivago - the version in English, back in the 1960's. The movie came nowhere near to matching it. Two other futuristic novels, I have read are 1984 by George Orwell and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. 1984 actually forewarned about the current political manipulations of news media and Brave New World actually forewarned about drug manipulations, such as we currently have, under Big Pharma.